new graphics card

**Peerzy** · 02-22-2005, 08:11 PM

Half Life 1

Nvidia 6600GT

**hungrylilboy** · 02-22-2005, 08:44 PM

**Skiz** · 02-22-2005, 08:53 PM

Originally Posted by hungrylilboy

no that would be half life 2 peerzy...thanks on the card. will take a look

is 128mb all i need?

For HL1, yes...HL2, no

**HCT** · 02-22-2005, 09:04 PM

Originally Posted by Skizo

For HL1, yes...HL2, no

i run HL2 on low settings on my old comp
it has a AMD Sempron 2400+
and ATI Radeon 7000
and with 384 MB of ram

**mike45450** · 02-22-2005, 09:20 PM

Yeah...128MB is enough (unless you can afford 256)

I have a 128 r9800 Pro and i run HL2 at all medium settings (except for shadows and the other useless thing) and it only lags if things get really busy.

**barnaby** · 02-23-2005, 02:19 AM

128 is enough i run hl2 and css on full graphics and it doesnt lag at all

i have a

ATI radeon 9600
2.5ghz P4
180gb hd
512ddr ram

i can run nething ive downloaded like nfsu 2 , toca 2 hl2 and css

**Snee** · 02-23-2005, 02:04 PM

As it happens I've done some research on 6600GTs and it appears there has been problems with those.

So there are a few things you might want to consider:

1) Making sure your PSU is good enough, 300w is the original requirement, but it turns out that a lot of people haven't been able to run a 6600gt without 400watts or more, this probably 'cos they didn't know a good PSU brand from a bad one.

So make sure that your psu is either rated way higher than 300watts or that it's at least 350watts of a really good brand (Antec true, Fortron), just to be sure, assuming you have a fullsize mobo. That way you have a margin.

2) many manufacturers have botched the cooling on the pci-e to agp bridge on the agp versions and other things, so if you are buying agp, make sure your brand is one that seems to work for a lot of people. XFX is not to be recommended, judging by the number of complaints.

3) Good (agp) brands appear to be; MSI, Leadtek, Gainward and ASUS.

Of these brands Gainward makes the fastest version with the GS GLH model (it comes with vivo too, and 1.6 ns RAM), but important to note about gainward is that the heatsink on the gpu has a bit more give on the mountings than you might wish for (which is fairly common with other brands too), and that it requires having an oc tool installed and running to reach those high speeds. This tool has been known to cause glitches on some systems.

MSI makes the most quiet card, but it's been prone to high temps in some reviews, but this has possibly been sorted.

4) Ideally, if you are sure your card is working right, you should mount some kind of aftermarket cooling with as5 or similar, no matter what brand you have. This will void your warranty tho'.

5) 256Mb cards are soon to be available in many parts of the world, where I'm at the gainward 1980 won't hit stores until april tho'. And when it does it'll be the standard, none GS, version with 2ns memory, 500Mhz core/900Mhz mem. I don't know how long it'll be until GS versions with 256Mb ram will come around.

6) Disabling fast writes in bios is almost a must to get a lot of 6600gts running right, but not all of them.

7) A lot of people are claiming that it's a bad chip period, no matter the brand, and that you shouldn't buy it at all, but then a lot of people are idiots too, so I can't tell you if it's true.

Another card with similar performance and a similar price is the 6800LE.

Mind you, this is all second hand information, for empirical data I'll have to wait until april, when I'm scheduled get my hands on a couple of these myself.